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I read the article this morning. I don't know that it classifies as a war. That either side called it that is a bit sad. Or even that there were sides to begin with.
When I was in college (early 2000's), I had a Mormon religion teacher from my church tell us about the dangers of dungeons and dragons. He said it might be hype but why take the chance. Young as I was, I believed him and went home and promptly threw my 3.5 core rulebooks in the trash. And then, I kid you not, I went to my room and cried.
Years later I figured out that guy didn't know what he was talking about, probably had never even seen the game played. A guy from church reintroduced me to 3.5 and I found Pathfinder by accident a year later.
Ironically, my current group is mostly compromised of Mormons. So glad that 'war' is all but over now.
America has this thing with WAR. We like to declare war on things. We declare war on Drugs, Cancer, etc.
Where I live in Michigan there was no problem with teachers or parents....On the other hand there are a lot of Roman Catholics around so that might have something to do with it ;)
Back in the 1980's, My friends and I would game during lunch at high school. We didn't have any teachers telling us it was wrong. I didn't have anyone at church saying it was wrong. I guess we didn't live in the conservative part of town.
I only heard about the bad things on TV and continued the games.
If this was about being a Firefly Fan and getting the show back for a movie, THEN the title would make sense. But no war has been fought, lost or won.
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It seems to me that we won the war the same way most wars are won: the other side's most stalwart warriors died.
This was a moral panic, though, so instead of violence taking its toll they simply died of natural causes, and the relevance they used to possess changed hands to a generation of D&D players that finally grew up.
In the good old days, the research that was done turned up nothing. The people involved never got enough influence to harm the sales. In time, the D&D players grew up to a far wealthier group who could decide for themselves - and nobody would have gained anything from forbidding RPGs.
We still have the moral panic warriors even here in Sweden, but the debate sort of died out suddenly, in 2003, with a pretty tragic story. A young man in the town of Halmstad, 15 years old or so, was found dead, dismembered in the woods, after some time disappeared. Once it was clear that he had died, the press (or rather a group of four journalists) decided to make RPGs the angle of the story. See, the victim was a roleplayer. They printed the hogwash our resident anti-RPG-crusader, Didi Örnstedt, had to say about it, calling her "a swedish RPG expert" because "there had been threats", which could be true, naturally. She said it was probably RPGs that had caused this. Everybody knew it was her, because she was the only person that could have been called a RPG expert in the Swedish press. The press kept on printing articles on the story, showing the victim dressed as Dracula from a Vampire live, even going so far as to darken the pictures they had taken from his homepage to make him look more menacing. Apparently, he had not only committed suicide due to playing RPGs (that's dangerous, m'kay kids?), he also dismembered himself and spread out his body parts due to RPGs (***error wtf does not compute***), which the press neatly avoided to mention...
Eventually... the police found that the poor guy had been falling in with some pretty dangerous people, and IIRC, taken a loan from them. The press dutifully printed a tiny article about this, then didn't mention the story again. Way to smear the murder victim.
But... after this, Didi has wisely kept her mouth shut in public about RPGs. It sort of never came up again after such a magnificent moronity.
I read and liked the article. Basically Fantasy RPGs are more accepted now and that is a good thing. I never really felt part of any war, and I suppose I am still marginalised just by the sheer numbers of people who DON'T play FRPGs. But hey, that's cool too! I'll never stop slaying demons, fighting evil and ridiculing halflings!
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Growing up in a conservative religious home, it certainly felt like a war. Certain people took the "threat" of RPGs seriously enough, anyways.
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I'm on the older side of the RPG fence [begin silly over-the-top old-man voice with cane waving from porch (though statements are still factual)]. I started playing D&D when I was about 7, 1982-83. I had several friends that said they couldn't play with me if we played D&D (only after telling their parents "I'm going over to his house to play D&D") and a few that could not play with me at all because I now played D&D. I later (much later, well after voting age) found out that my mom had taken verbal assaults from angry mothers telling her that she was a bad parent for letting me play in addition to all the "evil" and "going to hell" issues for playing "the devil's game."
I currently play with two guys who, in that same era (early 80's), didn't have as intelligent of parents as mine. One was told specifically that it was evil and that he wasn't allowed to play so he hid books under his bed, only played at other people's houses, and had to constantly hide it from his parents (which he still largely does...the not-telling his parents he plays, not the hiding under his bed, he's all adult living on his own, successful, constantly hit on, etc.).
The second player had it much worse. His parents found his AD&D books, took them, and burned them. Burned them. Because the game was evil, immoral, and threatened his chance at positive afterlife.
I remember watching the 60 Minutes episode on D&D when I was about 9 (1985). Adults were saying that the game I liked to play was going to make me kill myself or others...because of the Devil and demons. Those things that my character kills, in a game, these people believe are real. I certainly felt like I was under attack at that point. Losing friends because of it, big-adult-news-show denigrating it. Sure, I was very young and lacked full cultural context, but it was a cultural war. It may have been the equivalent of Republic of Molossia attempting to violently annex Reno, NV...culturally speaking, but it definitely felt like a psychological/cultural attack.
After about 1988, in my experience, it was pretty much over. Small pockets of "resistance" still exist, randomly attempting small-scale terrorist attempts (largely causing causalities only amongst their own), but the cultural war is over.
tl;dr: You youngin's don't know how goods ya'gots it, dagnabbit!
[end silly over-the-top old-man voice with cane waving from porch]
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Here is Michael A. Stackpole's 1989 paper/response to the anti-RPG (RPGs are satanic) movement.
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Small pockets of "resistance" still exist, randomly attempting small-scale terrorist attempts (largely causing causalities only amongst their own), but the cultural war is over.
I can vouch for that small pockets thing. My last roommate (who was also my final roommate... dude kind of scared me off of roommates in general) got into a church and saw my stack of pathfinder books out one day. He brought people from the church over to 'talk' to me about it, and things got more and more heated until I hid the books and told him that I gave them away. From that point on, I had to hide my weekly visits out to a friend's house to game so that I could keep peace in the household.
This happened 2 years ago between two adult men. Part of it can be chalked up to the fact that my roommate was crazy, but part of it can also be pinned on the influence of his church and other socially conservative friends.
I guess that for some people the war will never end.
Guhhhh... I would have tolerated exactly ONE (1) "talk" about it. During such, I would have made my view extremely clear. If it happened again, it would have been time to kick out/move/make a police affair of it.
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I guess that for some people the war will never end.
Yeah. It's still out there. It's minimized and relegated to the outer reaches of the society, but it's still there. Both the friends I mentioned still, to this day, even though they're nearly 40 and nearly 50 years old do not, under any circumstances, bring up RPGs or D&D to their parents. One of them has even come out to his parents as gay...but not as a D&D player. Homosexuality, which is specifically mentioned in the Old Testament as being "an abomination", he's been able to reveal to his parents but a RPG player, never mentioned in the bible, he has not.
In this day and age, where LotR and the Hobbit are blockbusters, where MMORPGs span the globe, and fantasy elements creep into every aspect of modern life...table-top pen-and-paper (descriptive titles that were not needed 20 years ago), while RPG players born after 1990 are largely (but not entirely) inoculated from the horrors that was the 80's view on gamers, many gamers still live in fear of their community or family finding out.
Sure, today, one can be called a dork, nerd, weirdo for playing D&D or Pathfinder or any other P&P RPG, but in/those-from the 80's; added to those current titles was "Satan-worshiper that would either end up killing themselves, seriously the game is going to make you, force you to commit suicide, and/or kill/murder your friends and family."
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In junior high, I spent a lot of time helping a friend find hiding places for books in his house. There was an old, non-working refrigerator in the basement, we actually dismantled the cooling unit to make space for books. We had a bit of panic when we accidentally flooded the house with freon. I don't remember how we managed to get out of that one, but his mom didn't find the books.
I was briefly banned from playing by my parents. I had gotten into a LOT of trouble (like felony trouble) and they were pretty pissed at my behavior in general. It wasn't a religious or moral thing, but more of a control thing. It didn't last long though.
Indirectly related, watch the documentary Jesus Camp (available on netflix right now). You'll see them talk about Harry Potter and how it's devil worship a few times.
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I don't think the war was won so much as abandoned. The media is always looking for the next big thing, and society always is trying to pin its problems on some minority interest which can be railed against without inconveniencing the status quo I was too young to remember the DnD panic, but I do remember the big debate over music lyrics and video games.
I think simply the media gets bored with a narrative after awhile, and so the hardcore people lose the spotlight and are relegated to the sidelines where they can be easily ignored.
Now that "nerd culture" is more mainstream, I think DnD is safe for awhile. And really...the hardcore fundamentalists have way way more things to be concerned about in American culture than DnD right now.
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I identify myself as Christian and I've never felt like a "pagan" for playing RPG's (been playing since '97). There are probably certain lines in my games that I would never cross, but I think most people have moral barometer in that regard that exists outside of their "religion".
My parents really had no problem with it, but I know if I had ever mentioned it to my grand parents, they would have freaked. But, that was just because they were more sensitive to sensationalism of the news back then. The Christian right in the US certainly has a lot to answer for in being reactionary, but in the same vein the news media always looks for the next bogeyman so that they can fill their time slots with "experts" who claim to know about such things. I'm very thankful that this hysteria did not come about in the middle of the 24hours news cycle or I think it could have been worse.
Parents and friends aside, how many of you had the "talk" with a girlfriend about being a gamer? I think trying to talk through their misconceptions was harder for me as a teenager than even what my parents thought.
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I remember watching court TV about 8-9 years ago. There was this case of a teen who had a relationship with a couple of 20 years olds. The trial was about the teen convincing them that her mother was abusive and needed to go. It was mentioned once that the two 20 soemthings played Dungeons and dragons online which the media had a field day with. It was barely mentioned during the trial but every media break the hosts were just going gangbusters on the fact these guys played "violent video game, MMO, dungeons and dragons!!!1!!!1!!one!!!" Sad to see in this day in age but then again its court TV they live for character assasination.
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Parents and friends aside, how many of you had the "talk" with a girlfriend about being a gamer? I think trying to talk through their misconceptions was harder for me as a teenager than even what my parents thought.
Definitely awkward at first, but now my wife plays an elf cleric of Sarenrae. So, you know, happy face.